Has Evangelion Killed Mecha?

Why has mecha disappeared? Think about it for a second. This question isn't as trivial as it might look like. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to claim that anime used to be synonymous with giant robots, and indeed 'mechamono' or 'robottomono', together with 'meisaku', was one of the biggest genres in Japanese animation.

The first real super robot anime was Mazinger Z, by Go Nagai. Other series would soon follow, some would especially come from the same author. What kept those projects alive was the generous sponsoring that toy companies would offer to animation companies: make good advertisement for our latest games, and we'll pay you well. It was a symbiosis that worked, but not without having considerable downsides. mecha stories soon became sterile, too fixated on formulas, and basically unfit to be anything else than glorified commercials.

Those interested in how things changed might want to look into the Anime Shin Seiki Sengen of 1981. This blog will deal with it only marginally and only in one particular occasion. The real goal I set out to accomplish, on the other hand, is to assess whether or not Neon Genesis Evangelion killed mecha anime. To be sure, this won't be the only anime to receive this treatment, but we'll start here for obvious reasons.

Do you remember the quarrel between Gigguk and Digibro a few years ago? It's not relevant to the topics treated here, but its implications are important. You see, Gigguk and Digibro produce very different content with a very different style. But it doesn't change the fact that they're both idiots and horribly misinformed.

Gigguk's mecha video goes so far as to imply that 'idols killed mecha'. This couldn't be further from the truth: mecha and idols have always coexisted, and arguably the first idol anime ever was also a mecha anime (Macross). Digibro's video about how Evangelion changed the face of anime forever is a perfect example of how not to talk about anime. Not only does it ignore the circumstances of Japan's economy in the 90s, it also flat out pretends several anime original stories simply didn't exist: Vifam, Dougram, and VOTOMs are the most notable examples. If you support these people financially on Patreon, I cannot urge you enough to just stop: these people aren't worth your time, never mind your money.

However Digibro's video has a saving grace: at 1:44 he candidly admits that anime had already been changed forever by Gundam in 1979. This is the cold hard truth, reinforced by the Anime Shin Seiki Sengen that occurred exactly outside of Gundam's last movie premiere. Gundam and Tomino did in fact, again and again, change the shape of the medium we have grown fond of. Here is the core of my thesis: Evangelion had an impact not only domestically, but especially abroad, because it cleverly used tropes and ideas that Tomino had already come up with. There's no innovation in Evangelion, just tropes that have been perfect and an authorial touch that made it shine.

But let's take a step back: who is Yoshiyuki Tomino? A visionary, a mastermind, a creator, and a failed student. He wanted to work with movies, but he dropped out and started working on anime instead. Growing up, he started to hate the otaku fanbase. It's hard to blame him, really: remember that back then mecha anime was about selling toys, and stories had to be a series of self-contained, monster of the week episodes. Worse yet, people in their twenties and older started to get passionate about it. Tomino was fed up with this, he was fed up with the logic of profit dictating how a work of art should be handled and he was fed up with his manchildren fans. The logic answer to these grievances was to produce Daitarn 3.

The people who worked on Daitarn 3 wanted something carefree and funny to deal with after drama heavy stories like Zambot 3. Daitarn's full name is indeed a reference to Zambot: we have 'the invincible steel man' Daitarn on one hand, and 'the invicible super man' Zambot on the other; one is powered by the moon, the other by the sun. We can consider Zambot the first series in which the choice of using young children and adolescents as ace pilots is questioned, a trope that Evangelion will carefully recycle. So Daitarn starts as a flamboyant, tongue-in-cheek series: emblematic is the episode in which the main character, Haran Banjo, discovers the impostors who dressed up as his friends because they're wearing different clothes than usual (a clear jab at how anime characters seemed to always be dressed the same).

But the joke runs deeper than that, and no one is able to escape Tomino's cynical sarcasm. Let's take again Haran Banjo: officially, he's 18, but let's not forget he lived on Mars. This means that measuring his age in Martian years, he's 33 Earth years old. A middle aged man pretending to be a teen, this is what Tomino thinks of Otakus! But the allegories don't stop here. If it's true that our protagonist is juvenile and immature, it's also true that the villains are likewise childish and petty. The Meganoid race never meant to cause harm to Earth: they just want to retrieve the Daitarn and defeat Haran Banjo. Upon learning this, several frustrated humans asked to be turned into Meganoids (robots) and Megaborgs (very big robots) in order to defeat him and gain power.

The truth about these two came as a shock to most fans

Little by little, the real themes of the anime emerge: hidden under a layer of irony, Tomino's story is actually a pathetic tale of a man too obsessed with his Oedipus complex to grow up. Central theme to Daitarn 3 is the idea of the familial nucleus falling apart, something that Evangelion will present again,in order to describe the relationship between father and son. This time, however, the roles are reversed: it's Haran Banjo who swears off his father and his works (the Meganoids themselves), and escapes on Earth with Daitarn 3, which is rumored to be his older brother's Megaborg form. Meanwhile, his mother has been turned into a Meganoid too, by the name of Korosu, and his father has become Don Zauker (even their names are similar: Zauker\Sauzer\Sozo). Here again we have the idea of a woman split between her role as woman and her role as mother: Haran's home computer is called 'MOTHER'. This idea will later be reinterpreted to create the MAGI system. The series ends with Haran Banjo killing his mother-as-a-woman, Korosu, and only then realizing that he has committed a foul atrocity.

Daitarn 3 isn't funny. It's bitter, almost nihilistic, and profoundly shocking. The Meganoids were, all along, a peaceful race that wanted nothing else but to live prosper. Their destruction of human lives are usually imputable to the short-sightedness and perverse nature of the human generals turned Meganoids, otaku mockeries living their power trip. When the truth dawns, it dawns in pain. Haran realizes that his childishness has costed the lives of his family members and has endangered countless other people. His friends stand him up in the last episode, claiming that they know "no such person" as Haran Banjo. This is the essence of Daitarn 3: a depressed man's take on otaku culture, which will later be touched upon again by Hideaki Anno, this time in a more sympathetic light.

And yet we couldn't talk properly about Tomino if we were to ignore his universally most acclaimed work: Mobile Suit Gundam. Space Colony of Side 7, Universal Century Year 0097: the One Year War rages on between the Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation, a gruesome conflict that has claimed the lives of half of humanity. 'People,' the narrator will go on to say, 'lived in fear of their own actions'. Gundam is a timeless masterpiece, a story of war and conflict in a genre in which evil scientists and noble heroes used to clash. Shades of grey and nuance find their way in a paradigm traditionally used to model the conflict of good vs evil, as the story becomes more convoluted and overarching and less episodic in nature. But it's so much more than that.

In Gundam, robots are no more and no less than war machines. They must be repaired, maintained and taken care of, just like in Evangelion. Amuro Ray receives the titular machine from his father, just like many heroes before him (Kabuto Kouji to name one), but he still needs to read the manual in between fights to understand how it works. In particular, Amuro Ray will lay the groundwork for Shinji Ikari: both prodigious children who want to prove that they can live up to their estranged father's expectations, but who will come to despise them because of their actions. Most importantly, Amuro Ray undergoes shock and trauma as he keeps piloting the Gundam. He makes it clear that he doesn't enjoy fighting, but he has to in order to protect his friends. He suffers from PTSD as the enemy soldiers start calling him ' the White Devil'. He undergoes a process of dehumanization that Shinji doesn't have to struggle against, having to fight mostly aliens incapable of communication.

Tomino hates Gundam. Well, he hates most anime really, but he hates Gundam in particular, probably because of how popular it is. One day, he destroyed a Gunpla kit in response to a fan asking him about a Gundam sequel. 'Here's your sequel, what do you think?' will be his sardonic reply. Most of all, Tomino hates the fact that his story about people and war has been so grossly misconstrued to be about 'robots' and 'realism'. He couldn't care less about that: character interaction and development are what he cares about, and if they have to occur through robotic war machines, then so be it. Just like in Evangelion, the role of the robot becomes marginal when compared to the role of the people operating it. But Gundam is also about politics: the inspiration clearly comes from 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', by Robert Heinlein, and in an act of courage, Zeon is chosen to depict not only Nazi Germany, but also Imperialist Japan. Other contemporary works will not dare insult the memory of Japanese involvement in WW2, using German-sounding names and villains to create their own 'fanfiction' about the last global conflict.

I digress. Gundam is, in the words of its own author, a work about communication and understanding between different people, lived through the eyes of a spoiled kid that becomes an adult by being exposed to different people, their realities and their outlook on life. And this, in my opinion, is something that Gundam has over Evangelion: the cast in the latter show largely shows sympathy and friendship to Shinj, whereas in Gundam the White Base Crew doesn't hesitate to slap, scold, and even punish Amuro. In Bright Noa's words, no one ever became a man without getting his s*it slapped. Even more importantly, there lurks the idea that even through understanding each other is possible, it's also true that this doesn't logically imply that everyone will agree (another aspect that is, in my opinion, lacking in NGE).

But where Gundam and Daitarn contributed significantly to the tropes that Evangelion will go on to use, we would have arguably never watched Anno's masterpiece if it weren't for Space Runaway Ideon. If you never heard of it, don't worry: neither did Japan until Anno reminded them that such an anime actually existed. It was their second 'ah, that happened!' moment since the series first aired (the first being the production of a movie bilogy). But Anno and his pals had long been obsessed with Ideon: even the Gunbuster recalls its design. And if you did Google it, yeah, the design of the Ideon sucks, in fact, it sucks so much that Tomino is credited for commenting 'Wow, such a shitty design could only possibly come from some forgotten alien civilization!'. Nevertheless, the people who designed the robot also paid him to spin a story about it, and Tomino complies, gifting us with one of the most peculiar shows in its genre.

If you have distractedly typed 'Ideon' in the search bar on Anime Amino, you have probably run into a poor review made by an user and into a few spoilers. I suggest you ignore them, there's really nothing that you'll learn by looking at those entries. Stay with me instead: Ideon is an hard sci-fi story about a group of runaways from planet Solo trying to survive the constant assault of the Buff Clan aliens. Unlike Gundam, there's only one mecha, the titular one. Enemies will mostly consist of fighter jets, starships and versatile walkers. Again unlike Gundam, rather than a human vs human conflict, Ideon talks about the war between humans and Buff Clan aliens. Funnily enough, Buff Clan aliens are biologically indistinguishable from humans, giving the story a completely different nuance that one could have expected.

The Solo Ship crew embodies everything that is despicable about the human race: they're petty, xenophobic, slimy, opportunistic, jealous and prone to anger and violence, a ratgag group of deplorables that won't stop disappointing with their behavior through the course of the story. But they're also a metaphor for post-war Japan, just like the Buff Clan embodies pre-war Japan, with its rigid social system and samurai code of conduct, to which several characters in the series appeal when asking for parlay or for a duel. This conflict between generations will be marginally touched upon by Evangelion, but finds in Ideon its most brilliant portrayal. Both civilizations are made up of 'homo sapiens', both civilizations call their motherland 'Planet Earth', and both civilizations look after the Ideon, a mysterious machine that is allegedly capable of generating infinite power.

But Ideon represents many more things. It's the weight of tradition, that both generations have to carry, a tremendous power that is largely beyond anyone's control. 'The Ideon', Buff Clan scientists claim, 'can only be invoked by the purest of hearts', that is the heart of children. And it's indeed children who trigger the activation and each power up of the Ideon, as the robot echoes their sentiment for self-preservation. In the context of the story, however, we can give a different interpretation to what is actually occurring. 'Ideon' is the name given to the collective consciousness of thousands of souls that fused. When one of the crew members falls ill, the Ideon offers him to join them. But he realizes that giving up his ego simply means giving into the Ideon, that is, feeding an even larger ego. In other words, he rejects a sort of Instrumentality ante litteram. The crew of the Solo Ship tries hard to act in accordance to what they interpret is the will of the Ideon not to lose its favor, but for the first time by the end of the series we start considering the possibility that the Ideon is indeed an evil god, interested only in its continued survival. And yet, if the Ideon were to deem both races unworthy to live, he would remorselessly destroy the universe.

The souls of those slain by the Ideon are trapped by the Ideon, while the Solo Ship's travel gives birth to comet showers that threaten to destroy both the Buff Clan's home planet and Earth, which the Ideon identify as sources of danger for him. Thus, in accordance with Freudian psychology, the kid is depicted as an evil, selfish creature, just like the Ideon. It is only when the Ideon is destroyed and the galaxy is cleansed of both the Buff Clan and the Humans that the souls trapped by the Ideon can finally roam free again, no longer shackled by the selfishness of the apocalyptic robot. I am certain that pointing out the parallels between the two works is largely useless, at this point, they should be self-evident.

Still, very little of what I talked about has to do with Evangelion. The question lingers: has Evangelion killed mecha anime? If so, why?

There is a sizeable amount of people that consider NGE as the arrival point of all mecha anime. They credit it for its 'revolutionary' characteristics, which were actually staples in pre-Evangelion anime, such as mature themes and psychological introspection. Some would even go as far as to call it a deconstruction. As a consequence, mecha anime is dead: it has reached its peak, and all we're left with are EVA clones like RahXephon, Aquarion and Darling in the Franxx. But this is not the only possible interpretation we can give to the accusation in the title. Hideaki Anno has clearly studied and loved the works of people like Tomino and Takahashi, who despised robots and their privileged role in Japanese animation. In short, they made mecha anime for people who didn't like mecha anime, and in turn they educated a generation in making mecha anime for non-mecha anime fans. The lesson taught by these 'bad teachers' is that mecha should cater to a vast audience, shoving the robots aside. This is why people say 'I don't like mecha, but...': that but is reserved for those peculiar series that dressed up as mecha without actually being mecha. As a consquence, mecha anime is dead, as no one cares to cater to the core audience.

Of course, this couldn't be further from the truth, as I have thoroughly demonstrated. EVA shines because of its brilliant direction and clever use of pre-existing ideas: I'd rather rewatch Evangelion than rewatch Ideon even if I prefer the latter, because the former has a sense of pacing that makes it a lot more agreeable. Even its decision to narrate the depression of an hikikomori otaku with sympathy rather than with cynicism (v. Daitarn 3) is commendable. EVA clones are just the proof that Evangelion has been a net positive to the genre as a whole, stimulating its creativity once again. We can't conveniently just chalk up the current mecha anime drought to Evangelion and Anno's misdeed, it's clear that the audience's sensibilities have changed, and mecha anime in the future should take care to address them in an engaging way if they hope to be successful.

In conclusion, to absolve EVA of its crime means to resize and to put into perspective its contributions to mecha, without necessarily knocking it down. Evangelion is certainly a work of art that will be remembered, but in no way did it reach the acme, nor did it kill mecha.

No offense dude.. but it stands out like a sore thumb when put up against all the other mecha anime. It wouldnt have the following it has if it was similar to the other mecha series. I disagree with your opinion but acknowledge we all have our own opinion. So to each our own.